by W. TECUMSEH FITCH
IMAGE/Amazon
What Kind of Creatures Are We? by Noam Chomsky. Columbia University Press, 200 pp., USD$19.95
Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential—and controversial—intellectuals of our time, and his writings have had enormous impact in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and political discourse. If the breadth of these contributions is remarkable, the depth of his insights in each of these fields is formidable and daunting. This scope, combined with the fact that much of his scholarly writing is highly technical, sometimes makes the unity of his thinking difficult to discern. Indeed, until I read this short and accessible volume, I always found it difficult to reconcile Chomsky the linguist/philosopher with Chomsky the political critic—his focus on innate limitations in language and mind seemed at odds with his steadfast political championing of individual freedom against oppressive forces. This recent book, in refreshingly clear if sometimes still challenging prose, provides the answer, and reveals an underlying unity in Chomsky’s perspective and thought on these topics.
In the four essays that make up the chapters of this recent book, What Kind of Creatures Are We?, he clearly leads us through his thinking in the domains of language (“What is Language?”), philosophy of mind (“What Can We Understand?”), and politics and ethics (“What is the Common Good?”), returning in the final essay to the general question of human knowledge and the history of science (“The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?”). Of course, Chomsky is first and foremost a linguist, and it is natural that his own historical trajectory and that of this book start with language—in my opinion the most biologically special and cognitively precious capacity our species possesses. I will thus start this review with some historical context concerning Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics and cognitive science before turning to the contents of individual chapters.
Chomsky famously reinvented linguistics as a young man, by reconceptualizing our language capacity in terms of both rigorous mathematical formalism, on the one hand, and strong innate biological predispositions, on the other. At the time, in the late 1950s, linguistics was strongly focused on speech phonetics (the “hard science” part of the language sciences, dominated by engineers and psychologists) and historical linguistics (clearly a branch of the humanities, with its roots in classical philology), with work on semantics based mainly on anthropological and sociological methodology. Syntax was barely discussed, if only because the flexibility of sentence structure and the potentially infinite variety of sentences seemed to put it beyond the empirical methods customary at the time. This potential for creativity in sentence structure, available to every ordinary language user and not just great orators or savants, posed a serious puzzle—so challenging as to remain basically ignored.
The young Chomsky, with a background in mathematics, realized that this must not be so. Some of the greatest mathematicians of the first half of the twentieth century, with Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Emil Post, and Kurt Gödel most prominent among them, had already developed a rigorous conceptual framework for analyzing infinite sets, and Chomsky recognized that with some modifications this framework could be put to use analyzing linguistic syntax as well. In particular, this formal framework enabled Chomsky to put some analytic meat on the bones of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s famous observation that “language makes infinite use of finite means.” To Chomsky, “grammar” was reinterpreted as the finite set of syntactic rules for combining words and phrases, possessed by each language user, and a “language” was the potentially infinite set of sentences that could be created using these tools. Thus, the obviously limited nature of our knowledge of language could be reconciled, in a rigorous fashion, with the seemingly unlimited freedom and creativity we evidence in using language.
Chomsky’s second great early insight was that syntax could not be adequately captured by the notion of “word order” with which syntax was often conflated (especially in the English-speaking world, due the relatively impoverished nature of English inflection and morphology). Rather, it is the tree-like syntactic structure of sentences that must be the object of syntactic inquiry. It is only because we can capture the phrasal hierarchical structure of a sentence like “the boy who fed the dog chased the girl” that we can understand that semantically it is the boy who chased the girl (despite the word sequence “the dog chased the girl” being present in the sentence).
These two insights—the structure-dependent nature of syntax and the value of rigorous mathematics in capturing the creative syntactic capacity—were almost instantly recognized as revolutionary. The timing of these insights seemed particularly opportune, because computers were at that time just becoming powerful enough to engage with human language and large-scale machine translation was seen as a major and quickly attainable goal at the time. Before Chomsky had even defended his PhD at Penn, he was invited in 1951 to join the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, and after completing his PhD in 1955 he was invited to join the faculty of MIT, where he has remained ever since.
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